Saturday, April 15, 2017

I don’t know, any more than you
do, who will finish first and second in the first round of France’s
presidential election next Sunday. The candidates, far right, center right,
center left and far left are Marine Le Pen, Francois Fillon, Emanuel Macron and
Jean-Luc Melenchon.

My friends in Paris prefer Fillon—a
French Margaret Thatcher-- but he has been hit with a scandal and investigation
because he hired his wife for a make-work job that paid her handsomely for
doing nothing. My friends tell me it was all perfectly legal. Were it not for
the scandal Fillon would probably have won. Now, he is unlikely to make it
through the first round.

For the record, leading French
psychoanalysts, who are mostly concerned with exercising political influence,
support the far left candidate: Melenchon. After all, he is a great admirer of
Hugo Chavez. No kidding. The wet dream of French Lacanians, in particular, is to turn
France into Venezuela or at least Argentina. My French feminist friends deplore
Melenchon.

I am not going to regale you with
statistics about the horse race, but I do want to draw attention to some
interesting commentary from The New York Times and the Nation. The Times has
run a long piece by Roger Cohen. The Nation has offered some analysis by Cécile Alduy. Both articles are worth your attention.

Cohen attempts a task that one
should normally avoid. He tries to capture the French national mood, that is, the French malaise. To be fair, the French have a right to malaise; it's their word:

For some time France has been a
country that does not like itself. Somewhere on the road from its humiliation
in World War II to its
disappointment with European integration to its discomfort with globalization,
France slid into moroseness. High-speed trains purred; France pouted. Grumbling
became a way of life, the response to lost grandeur. Now France seems ready to
vent this slow-ripening anger in an election that could see the extreme right
return to power for the first time since the 1940s and Europe revert to a
turbulence not seen since that epoch.

Not liking itself is certainly a
misstatement. The country that gave us a movie called, in English: The Sorrow and the Pity is not dealing
with a garden variety dislike. Of course, the correct translation of the title
should have been: The Chagrin and the
Pity. Clearly, the anguish and the shame associated with chagrin have
nothing to do with sorrow.

Historical events, especially the humiliation
of World War II, have certainly contributed mightily to producing this mood.
But, so too has Freudian psychoanalysis, a pestilence that risks turning France
into Argentina. Or, should I say, Venezuela.

If anyone is going you to think
the worst about yourself and your country, it is psychoanalysis. After all, as
I have occasionally noted, the French embraced an especially French version of
psychoanalysis because they did not want to be infected with the pestilential
culture coming from England and America. They were so terrified of emulating
the Anglosphere that they even supported Communism in the postwar period. Given
the choice between America and the Soviet Union… they opted
for the latter. To their great chagrin.

If you learn anything from
psychoanalysis, it is to focus on failure. Cohen lists a few:

Instead the French are focused on their country’s
failures: its dispatch under Vichy of Jews to their deaths, its painful
colonial past in Algeria, its faltering attempts to integrate one of Europe’s
largest Muslim communities, its vulnerability to terrorist attacks in Paris and
Nice, its expensive and sometimes rigid welfare state, its ambiguous
relationship to global capitalism, its fraying model of “laïcité” (or secularism) designed to
subsume religious difference in the values of the French republic — all are
endlessly agonized over.

For the record, Cohen supports all
manner of illegal immigration. Like a good liberal he imagines that millions of
Muslim immigrants can be assimilated. He does not mention that most of the
Muslim immigrants in France have been there for decades and do not want to
assimilate. In Germany where jobs are on offer, the immigrants do not do them.
Second generation Turkish immigrants have an unemployment rate of around 80%.
Let’s not blame it on France.

Obviously, Muslim immigration is
the problem. Many gay Frenchmen and women are supporting Marine Le Pen, despite her
apparent associations with right wing extremists. They have recognized that
Muslims want to kill gays… ergo…. they are defending themselves by supporting the candidate who wants to make France French again.

Cécile Alduyoffers
a picture of what the French have been seeing on their television screens and
often encountering in the streets:

Some
240 citizens have died in terrorist attacks in the country since 2015, the
highest number since the Algerian War. During that same period, prime-time
television has shown lines of destitute migrants in Europe marching through
fields, forests, snow, and mud, and makeshift boats packed to the brim with
desperate families. Such images were once merely the rhetorical flourishes of
fearmongers who warned of an “invasion” of Europe by legions of foreigners. If
you add to this the country’s soaring income-inequality problem, the
frustration with a European Union bent on austerity measures, the bloody
confrontations between police and young people or union members during the many
demonstrations in the last two years, and an unemployment rate stubbornly stuck
around 10 percent, then the National Front’s incendiary rhetoric might just
ignite the fires of electoral rebellion this time around.

The polls suggest that Marine Le Pen will make it into the
second round and will lose decisively. Yet, Alduy notes that if French
politicians do not solve the nation’s problems, the next time she might well
win.

My concern/objection it calling the French far right "far right". It seems to me that the "far right" is only far right because the far left is sooooooo far left. I'd like to think of the "far right" as roughly comparable to the GOP, but I lack the confidence say that they are. France, however has a government that ignores and wants to wish away the real problems facing them from the Muslim immigrants.